5 Best Ways To Retain Top Talent at Your Brokerage

As many of us have experienced, finding and hiring top talent is no small feat. It requires investing serious amounts of time, effort and money, and sometimes you don't even find exactly what you're looking for. Then, once you've found that perfect fit, you need to invest time in on-boarding and training them. All-in-all, it could be months from when you first make contact with a candidate to when they actually start driving significant results for your business!

So, when you do find that perfect fit, you should be doing everything you can to retain them. But what does this look like in practice? What are the most effective ways to retain your best, most promising employees? Well, here are 5 tips to get you started.

1. Training

Realtors operate very independently, but often times they will look back to the brokerage for best practices and training on the proper processes. It's a two way street and providing training can ultimately provide growth for both.

Obviously, a significant amount of training occurs while on-boarding a new employee, but training should not stop there! Offering new education and training opportunities to your employees at frequent intervals will refresh their interest and will aid in their professional development. It is often when employees feel like they're no longer learning that they begin to look for that next move.

Ensure that your training program spans a variety of topics, including: sales training, new technologies, leadership, and industry trends.

2. Technology

Is your brokerage providing the right technology for your agents? Real estate technology is massive industry that continues to grow. There are countless apps and platforms out there than can help simplify nearly every aspect of your operations. If your agents feel that you're not keeping up with the industry's technologies, they may start to look for someone who is.

But at the same time, be sure not to bombard your agents with too many different technologies, as this can often over-complicate things and lead to frustration. Finding and implementing a select handful of tools that are right for your company can go a long way in keeping the interest and engagement of your agents.

3. Lead Generation and Nurturing

Managing the entire lead life cycle from generating leads to nurturing them to converting them can be a lot to handle for agents who have many clients. However, if their brokerage can alleviate some of that challenge by obtaining potential leads for an agent and developing a simple, consistent cadence to cascade the leads, then agents can shift their time to what they enjoy most, nurturing and closing.

4. Continuing Education

Continuing education goes hand-in-hand with training, but too many companies only offer the training part. Many industries now are constantly changing and evolving as we all shift to more digital practices, and your brokerage is no exception!

In terms of how to serve your training and education pieces to your agents, think about what would work best for them. Considering that they're often in the field, working varying schedules, it may make sense to offer your trainings on a digital platform. In this case, agents can log on at the time that works best for them and complete the course. This added flexibility means a lot to agents who are often working evenings and weekends.

5. Transparency

Transparency is something that many companies are striving for, but there are only a few that are able to achieve it in an effective way. It probably isn't productive to share complete financials or what other agents are grossing, but having transparency on some level that works for you can create some positive feelings across your brokerage.

Trust is the biggest feeling that transparency can create and if your agents trust you they are much more likely to stay at your brokerage. Share with them your experiences, the story of how you got started, or how much you've grown in the last year. With these examples, you can create a more open atmosphere that your talent will appreciate.

Growing Your Brokerage

Implementing these five strategies into your brokerage takes little effort in comparison to the effort it take to land top talent, and together they can go a long way in improving your employee engagement and employee retention. You top talent will more than likely want to stay, and you'll start to attract even more talent into your brokerage!

Have you implemented any of these practices into your brokerage currently? How are they working? Have some more suggestions? Let us know know in the comments below!